I’m really looking more for a GQ answer as to what Federal actions can be viewed as being allowed principally by the Necessary and Proper clause of the Constitution, rather than under the other enumerated powers of Article 1, Section 8.
The recent case of the US vs. Comstock was argued based upon it, of course. I suspect that whatever rule it was that made school attendance mandatory way back when (assuming that was Federal) was based upon it. Possibly the interstate highway system was?
I assume there will be some argument over what does or doesn’t count, hence putting this in GD. But specifically I’m looking for examples where I think everyone, regardless of political stripe, would agree that it was a good thing.
Uh, everything? The Necessary and Proper Clause combined with the Interstate Commerce Clause are responsible for most of what the federal government does inside U.S. borders. Social Security, the minimum wage laws, the Civil Rights Act (mostly), OSHA, the EPA, some federal education law (although No Child Left Behind is, IIRC, a creature of the Spending Clause). Lots of federal criminal law, incl. the War on Drugs. And most anything else you can think of that isn’t military, patents, or the post office. (Also, some civil rights legislation is based out of the Reconstruction Amendments, although the N&P Clause applies to them, too.)
There is a lot of commentary on the Right about how this is all terrible (Cf. Rand Paul pooh-poohing the Civil Rights Act), so I don’t know how likely you’re going to find anything that radical conservatives agree is a good thing, esp. given who seems to be running the GOP coalition these days. But in this poster’s opinion, that’s rhetoric, not reality. (Let us note that in the several-year period in which the GOP had control of every instrumentality of government, they never even tried to ax most of this stuff.)
–Cliffy
Well so keep listing. I was able to come up with monopoly busting on my own but I’m not entirely certain of everything the Federal government has done through history, particularly some of the big landscape changing things (like the Louisiana Purchase) that are taken for granted.
Conventional wisdom, of course, is that the Necessary and Proper Clause (AKA the Elastic Clause) authorizes nothing by itself, but if any other power enumerated somewhere in the Constitution can be stretched to cover a desired action, the N&P Clause authorizes it.
On the bar exam’s multiple choice questions, “the Necessary and Proper Clause” is NEVER the correct answer.